They have their own standard of values in personal intercourse, and they can wait patiently and in impressive silence. They are always willing for someone else to hold the spotlight on their rural stage.
About themselves they are naturally taciturn, and public and unfriendly criticism has been proved to be a hazardous diversion. If the thought and comment of the stranger upon the mountaineer could be compared with the keen and often humorous analysis of the stranger the score would be found in surprizing frequency on the side of the calm and silent mountaineer.
They give but little heed to the clothes a man wears but look clear-eyed at the man within the clothes. They have no criticism for the way a man says his say, so he has something to say. A noted college professor, himself a mountain boy, maintains:
"I would rather hear a boy say 'I seed' when he had really seen something, than to hear a boy say 'I saw' when he had not seen it."
Old Coonrod Pile lived in the valley until his life spanned from the days when it was a hunting-ground of the Indians to the time when he can be remembered by some of the men and women now living in Pall Mall, who knew him as the most influential man of his time in the section, the owner of the river-bottom farm land, vast acres of hardwood timber, a general store and a flour mill worked by his slaves—a man grown to such enormous size and weight that in his last days he went about his farm and to oversee his workers in a two-wheeled cart pulled by oxen.
Those of the valley who now remember him were children when he died, for he was born on March 16, 1766, and his death occurred on October 14, 1849.
He saw his valley home changed from a part of the State of Franklin to a part of the State of Kentucky, then to Tennessee, and the abstracts to the deeds for land he owned show that Pall Mall was first in Granger county, later in Overton and finally in Fentress county as the State of Tennessee developed. Pall Mall is but seven miles from the Kentucky line, and for many years Coonrod thought he had taken up his residence within the Kentucky border.
Settlers of those days in leaving the Carolinas and Virginia traveled usually due west in search for a new home. It was this belief that he had settled in Kentucky that has led many to the opinion that Coonrod's former home was in Virginia. Others, without more definite knowledge for foundation, maintain that as he settled in Tennessee he had lived in North Carolina. The written word was rarely used and the stories of the earlier days in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" are tradition.
In a newly settled territory a man's birthplace and antecedents are facts immaterial to the community's welfare and many incidents historical in nature concerning Old Coonrod have been lost in the waste-basket of forgetfulness and no one now at Pall Mall has "heard tell of jes' where he come from." Yet some readily say that he came from "over yonder," and they point back across the mountains toward North Carolina.
In the first map of Tennessee, made by Daniel Smith, there is a dip in the northern boundary of the state line where Fentress county is located. But this was found to be an error of survey and later corrected. The surveyors of those days were men of courtesy and accommodation, for in the establishment of the Tennessee-Virginia line they surveyed around the southern boundary of the farm of a hospitable host and left his lands in Virginia because the old fellow maintained he had never had any health except in the mountains of Virginia.